What matters may come down, actually, is whether the Suns should have kept Isaiah Thomas and traded Eric Bledsoe. In that case, there is a great chance that Phoenix could be featuring a starting back court of Thomas and Booker right now, although the presence of Bender and Chriss would be dubious.
Now, of course, the idea of trading Bledsoe and keeping Thomas would have been ridiculous to many people at the time. Bledsoe was younger (albeit by just one year) and an established starter with the Suns, and he was much better defensively. Then again, Thomas was clearly better at most aspects of offense. He was a superior shooter with a natural half-court game in the pick-and-roll, whereas Bledsoe struggled when he could not simply explode to the basket on the break. (Bledsoe has improved his half-court and pick-and-roll game since then, but it is still not as good as Thomas' then, let alone Thomas' now.)
According to Real Plus-Minus, Thomas and Bledsoe were almost identical in value this past season, with Thomas' advantage on offense nearly erased by his disadvantage on defense (even if Bledsoe rated as a mediocre defender this year compared to the elite defender that he used to be).
http://www.espn.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/sort/RPM/position/1 But finding good defenders, while not exactly easy, is much easier than finding someone who can consistently create efficient offense for himself and his teammates, especially in half-court situations. Steve Nash makes for an operative analogy, and although Thomas does it as more of an Allen Iverson-type scorer (with much better efficiency and shooting ability, albeit in today's spacious context), like Nash he creates constant problems for defenses in the pick-and-roll and routinely scrambles half-court defenders. Just as the Suns were able to surround Nash with enough good defenders (albeit usually with a glaring weakness in the middle) to constitute a number-one seed and a championship contender, the Celtics have been able to do the same with Thomas (in the East, at least.) Likewise, the 76ers won a mediocre conference by surrounding Iverson in that manner. Bledsoe, conversely, while a good offensive player, will never be "that" offensive player—so how do you build a winning team around him? You could win with him, but the roster's overall offensive requirements will be much greater.
I am not blaming McDonough regarding this issue; the matter is much easier to see in retrospect. Still, the possibilities are intriguing to ponder and potentially useful moving forward.
The ideal scenario is that you find a point guard who excels at creating efficient offense for himself and teammates and is also good defensively, like Kevin Johnson or Chris Paul (even though I feel that Paul dribbles too much, due in part to his mediocre left hand). But in that case, you are arguably talking about top-five point guards all time (certainly top-ten)—and the only two players to ever average at least 20.0 points, 10.0 assists, a .500 field goal percentage, and 2.0 steals in the same season.
